Washington (CNN)It was a photo-op meant to portray President Donald Trump at his most commanding: Flanked by senior military leaders, Trump was there to plot America’s response to a suspected chemical gas attack in Syria.
Instead, his boiling display in the White House Cabinet Room on Monday evening only served to underscore the President’s most visible weakness: his ambient rage over Robert Mueller’s Russia investigation.
The special counsel, Trump declared, was conducting a “total witch hunt.” The FBI raid carried out on his longtime fixer and personal attorney Michael Cohen’s office is “frankly, a real disgrace.” And the investigation into his campaign’s ties to Russia amounts to “an attack on our country in a true sense.”
Rarely has Trump’s ever-simmering anger over the Russia probe erupted on camera as it did on Monday. The news that FBI agents had carted away documents and records related to, among other things, the adult film actress Stormy Daniels from Cohen’s office prompted the type of emotional diatribe that his allies and advisers have long sought to head off.
That’s left his aides and advisers wondering — and in some cases dreading — what might come next.
People familiar with Trump’s thinking said Monday that the Cohen revelation struck the President harder than seeing other associates caught up in the Mueller swirl. Unlike campaign aides Paul Manafort or Michael Flynn, Cohen has been a longtime fixture of Trump’s orbit. He was a regular presence inside the Trump Organization headquarters on the 26th floor of Trump Tower. And he acted as an enforcer of secrets, admitting to paying off at least one woman who alleged she’d carried out a sexual affair with Trump.
He was, in the telling of one person who worked with both Trump and Cohen for years, “the closest person to Trump that I have ever met who is not family.”
Trump made the decision on his own to directly — and bluntly — address the FBI raid of Cohen’s office during his meeting with top military brass and his national security advisers. One White House official said there was no discussion among aides about the President not talking about it at his event.
He wanted to air his grievances,…
